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TS Eliot and Tradition

History is often seen as a way of advancing to the next stage and improving the cultural values of the past. However, for T.S. Eliot, modernity had ruptured its connection to a more vital past and was as a result impoverished. History is instead characterized by regression and ruptures. In his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” his idea of tradition shows retrogression instead of progression. Eliot argues that “the whole literature of Europe from Homer” (49) is an archive of works affecting authors in the present moment and is in turn influenced by those authors in the present. In other words, the poet's predecessors are those to whom he is indebted for all that he has inherited: his language, his rationale, his perspective, and his standards of conduct. He acknowledges his debt by allowing these ancestors deliver their ideas through his literary pieces. Paradoxically, the more willingly he lets them to speak, which is to indicate the less he self-indulgently attempts to make his work appear original with him, the more fully his work brings the impression of his individuality. In a way, for Eliot, the word “tradition” thus is the ability to restructure the elements of collection of works so as to demonstrate a new connection to it and to create a sense of simultaneity between past and present, as demonstrated in his work, The Waste Land.

In the essay, Eliot admires the literary tradition and indicates that poets are those who write with a sense of connection with the predecessors. He argues that “No poet, no artist of any art has him complete meaning alone. His significance…is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets” (49). A poet is thus not an individual disconnected from the foundation of literary history, because the poet cannot create original art without being able to recognize the entire past of literature and how his or her art connects to that past. In this way, when a piece of new art compares or contrasts to the art created previous to it, art from the past is simultaneously affected by the new art.

Eliot also links this literal critical concept of simultaneity between past and present to the act of breathing, indicating the act “as inevitable” (48). Eliot connects the idea to this two-way process of respiration, because literary tradition appears to be a repetitive process of recirculation. Writing in present of the past inevitably results in the action of taking in and then recirculating tradition, similar to the action of inhaling and exhaling. Through this comparison, poets are thus interconnected and influence the past of poetry just as the past influences them, neglecting historical and chronological differences among the works.

The Romantic notion of originality and creativity contradicts with Eliot’s idea of art as having “a simultaneous existence and compo[sing] a simultaneous order” (49). The Romantics assert that the artist must have the ability to create the most exclusive work without learning from any other work. For instance, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria appreciates poetry as the forming of ‘deep feeling’ through ‘profound thought’ into words that acquire a ‘sense of novelty and freshness’ (166). Similarly, Friedrich Schegel asserts that if poems are “not completely unique, free and true, then…they’re worthless” (15). Shelley emphasizes poetic inspiration of ‘the greatest poet’ as ‘original purity and force’, shaped by ‘labour and study’ (228). The Romantics thus place their poetic value upon originality and unique expression, celebrating sense of creativity and rejecting the idea of imitation. Eliot’s essay clearly initiates a movement away from originality. Instead of perceiving past poets as competition, Eliot views past poets and their works as a medium to cultivate and sharpen contemporary poetry. Eliot recognizes that association with predecessors is seemingly inevitable for all present poets, but emphasizes the shared state of this association, by which all...

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Eliot’s theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ may be said to be an attempt to find some kind of historical explanation to the dissolution of the tradition of unified sensibility which found its perfection in the writings of Dante and Shakespeare. The unified sensibility was a sensibility which was the product of a true synthesis of the individual with the traditional, of feeling with thought and of the temporal with the eternal.
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Eliot is one of the founders of the New Criticism, or formalism, which is based on the idea that the only thing the critic should look at is what is inherently contained within the text. This idea springs from modernist theory, which holds within it a great dichotomy. Louis Menand asks was modernism très moderne, or was it très ancien? Modernism sometimes looks like a heroic effort to rescue literature from anachronistic conventions and to fit it to the needs of the modern world; but it can also look like an attempt to resurrect for literature an even more severely anachronistic privileged status, and nearly every aspect of our understanding of modernist writing is infected by this indeterminacy.
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..."Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" T.S. Eliot
(T.S. Eliot Quotes.) TSEliot was not only a poet, but a poet that wanted to change his world. He was writing in the hopes that it would give his society a reality check that would encourage them to change themselves and make their lives more worthwhile. Through his themes of alienation, isolation, and giving an example of a decaying society, TSEliot wanted to change his society.
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The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
(Eliot, 1915, line 16-17)...

...T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born to a very remarkable New England family on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware, was a very successful businessman and his mother, Charlotte Stearns Eliot, was a poetess. While visiting Great Britain in 1915, World War I started and Eliot took up a permanent residency there. In 1927, he became a British citizen. While living in Britain, Eliot met and married Vivienne Haigh -Wood and at first everything was wonderful between them. Then he found out that Vivienne was very ill, both physically and mentally. In 1930, Vivienne had a mental breakdown and was confined to a mental hospital until her death in 1947. Her death was very hard on Eliot and he died on January 4, 1965. Most of Eliot's works were produced from the emotional difficulties from his marriage.
Because of Eliot's economic status, he attended only the finest schools while growing up. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and Milton Academy in Massachusetts. In 1906, he started his freshman year at Harvard University studying philosophy and literature. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy in only three years. Eliot went on to study at the University of Oxford and also at the Sorbonne in Paris. At the Sorbonne, he found inspiration from writers such as Dante and Shakespeare and also from ancient literature, modern...

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Eliot imparts to us the Grail quest’s influence on “The Waste Land” in the notes:
“Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.”
Indeed, much of the poem reflects the story of the Grail quest itself; when confronted with a prosperous land turned into waste as a result of the wounding or ill health of the Fisher King who presides over the land, a hero begins a quest which ultimately must restore the king to health in order to “free the waters” (R2R) and restore the land itself. As the hero must heal this desolate wasteland which was once a happy and lively place, so too are vestiges of happier times painfully remembered among desolation and despair throughout “The Waste Land,” seen even in the opening of the poem:
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
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...and its ills.
The Poet TSEliot is well known for his descriptive character based poems that represents reality and observations in society. He challenges the audience to not only look beyond the general creation of a character but to also relate their opinions to the real world. This can be seen in the poems Rhapsody published in 1915, and Preludes Published in 1917. Eliot allows the responder to consider how such social discontentment can also pervade modern society.
Eliot’s poem Preludes, thoroughly explores the fragmented state of mind of the persona, allowing the responder to connect with the character. In urbanization though time is constantly moving forward, there is a futile pattern in people’s lives which is described in the first and second stanza. In stanza one he recites “The winter evening settles down with smells of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. Being set in winter, brings visual images of death and disease. The personification of the winter evening settling down represents a negative theme. From this statement we understand that Eliot believed that the quality of life after the Industrial Revolution is and will always be dull and monotonous. A strong emphasis on 6 o’clock shows that people exist in miserable, automatically programed lives and are unable to escape. The world is forever expanding and urbanization is moving so fast that it is taking over what used to be a wholesome, clean...

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"Let us go then, you and I".
Throughout the poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, written by TSEliot, there is a consistent use of the words 'you' and 'I'. Not much is said about the narrator or who he is talking to and after conducting research on TSEliot himself as well as reading opinions of critics on this topic, my understanding of who the 'you' and 'I' is has changed quite significantly.
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock was originally written, primarily, between February 1910 and July or August 1911. The poem was not first published until June 1915 in the poetic magazine Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago, USA. This was in fact Eliot's first publication of a poem. 'Prufrock' (abbreviation of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock) was made famous when it was published in Prufrock and other Observations in 1917 in London. This was a pamphlet containing Eliot's oeuvre where 'Prufrock' was the first in the volume. It was this publication which brought fame to Eliot.
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